Singe

While walking down to the mall I passed a kid, one stranger than I usually would see wandering the street at this hour in the evening. He walked with a limp however his speed was quicker than normal. He looked my way, it was as if he was looking right through me. I had gotten a chill down my back as my neck hairs stood on end and something in my head said run but my feet stood planted to the ground.

I couldn’t move. My body was useless.

His eyes turned from my direction then shot up to the sky, he flinched briefly then kept walking on. I had heard stories about this kid from many others with many different theories but nobody really knew him, he was a shadow in our abyssal world, he never spoke a word from what I gathered by the stories I heard. I thought it was all just a myth but suddenly there he was in broad moonlight as he walked further away I could finally move my limbs, my mind was racing in terror as my heart was racing and pounding painfully in my chest. I just started to run the other way away from that deadly creature.

Over the next span of a month, days and nights went as usual with school and work. I started to think maybe the rumors of this kid got burned into my head and I was just seeing things so I shrugged the whole thing off. Two months went by when weird things around the town started happening, signs where burned and melted until they were unrecognizable. There were burned footsteps that started showing up in random places down paths in the forests and sides of buildings also faintly being seen on the inside of a few ceilings in outdoor arenas. The tourists became terrified and confused of this area creating more traffic crashes than usual, even the locals where getting a bit frantic. Everyone was put on edge due to these incidents for these kind of things never happened in a town such as this.

Remembering that one night the image of that kid shot into my head as I tried to tell a few friends about what I had seen previously and they just laughed at me saying over and over again that he was just a myth from parents to scare kids at night so they would stay indoors and that these incidents were probably played by some jokers trying to make the myth more real. I then joined in on the laughter pushing the thought that he was real back into my mind.

One night while coming back from a party at my friend’s house I took the usual route back to my place down the streets and across the cement bridge that passed the bubbling Creek into the muddy path towards my place. I started to smell something like campfire as I walked but just thought maybe someone was having a bonfire in their backyard, however as I walked the smell was getting stronger with a tinge of sulfur shortening my breaths so I started walking faster hoping that I would pass the smell and continue my walk in peace.

I heard a crack of a small branch behind me so instinctively I spun around to look only seeing the path I had walked completely deserted, I silently laughed at myself getting so excited over a little noise as I went to turn around again to keep going to my house I was stopped dead in my tracks. Drops of fire started to drip from the sky around me burning dots into the ground by my feet out in front of me in the darkness came a light of eerie proportions flickering from yellow and red. I couldn’t help but stare in awe at the phenomenon happening around me. A strained disembodied voice came from the light and said to me,

“You’re to cold”.

The light grew closer then got so bright my eyes squinted to try and adjust to the brightness in front of me when I felt my blood freeze and my mind scream, it was him standing right in front of me, he was laughing as black smoke bellowed from his mouth. The drops of fire started to burn my skin, it gave me enough energy that I darted backwards and started to run through the black path, the laughing faded as I got further away. Once I couldn’t hear it anymore I stopped running with the thought I had lost him when a tree beside me burst into flames there he was standing beside me his yellow eye peering into my soul, his pupils went from the normal circular to a slit and I felt my body drop as my skin began to burn from my bones, with every scream I made he continued to stare with a crooked smile on his face, it began to become pointless as my screams became curdled, he knelt down and touched my face with his clawed burnt fingers and frowned.

“You’re still too cold, here lets heat things up a bit” he said sneeringly while he started to tear the crusty burnt skin from my body.

It felt as if searing razorblades were slowly tearing at and through my flesh reaching the muscles underneath. I shed a tear but once I hit my skin it evaporated from the heat. He went to grab a tendon and as he was tearing it away from my muscle when something else caught his attention. His head shot up and in a flash of fire he was gone. I was left lying on the ground in immense pain unable to move when I heard footsteps running towards my direction. I tried to see who was running in my direction when everything went black.

I awoke in the hospital in the burn ward with doctors talking over me and needles being stuck into my arms, it felt as if ice was being injected into my veins I screamed as they held me down and one doctor grabbed another needle and jabbed it into my neck then all went black again, when I awoke this time there was two guys in suites sitting by my bed with a puzzled look on their face.

”Oh you’re finally awake.”

I looked at the one who mouthed those words, the other just sat there and stared at me in awe.

They went onto asking me what had happened that night to describe what I had seen and what I had been through, so as I started to speak the situation.

The guy I saw had hair down past his back with the edges red fading into orange, then yellow and a tinge of blue, at the roots being platinum blonde. He looked my direction with these striking eyes, one was a blinding yellow, and the other a crimson red. Both of his hands and halfway up his forearms where burnt with discolored and blackened skin. With a crooked smile revealing jagged top and lower canine fangs, it looked as if his mouth had been once stapled together but was now ripped back open with the staples still there. His skin tone was as if he had never stepped foot in the sun, it was a pale white with grey shadows along his facial structures, around the eyes showed a deep red growing darker and darker the closer it got to his eyes. His looks consisted of someone who had not rested in years.

His attire was of a tattered black trench coat that was burned on the bottom edges, and chains ran down the back to his hips, connecting the chains to the jackets where metal skulls with the end chain dropping from its upper jaw. Underneath his jacket was a black blood splattered shirt. Black jean pants with shreds all down the legs with a red fabric underneath while the right leg looked like it had been burnt to the knee. He wore black boots that had been wrapped at the top almost reaching his knees with burns all over them.

The second guy got up and left the room as the first one kept asking me on going questions about the fires and what else I could have seen, then went on to say how the fire was started with a lighter that I had in my pocket and because of the heat I was hallucinating but I know what I had seen, and that was no hallucination.

I kept telling him over and over about what I had saw and saying there was someone there I saw him. Mentally I was screaming at them furiously stating, he started the fire, he was the fire.

The second suited man re-entered the room quickly and stated

“I’ve heard enough.”

Three doctors entered the room and started to strap me to the bed and wheeled me to the psychiatric area of the hospital.

After one year I was fully healed from the burns and finally released from the psych ward. along with the so called healing medications, they gave me some anti-psychotics and “downers” to keep me calm, they think because of being burned alive I have gone insane and made him up but no I haven’t he’s real… He was there, and he’s still out there.

There is a good premise here about a pyrokinetic demon child and those unfortunate to meet him. But that gets tangled up in the rest of the story. The sentence structure is a little unusual at times, and there are places where the diction simply doesn’t make sense. Such as when the narrator’s screams begin to curdle. Blood curdling screams are a thing, because blood, being a fluid, can curdle. Screams cannot. I would find a friend to read through this and catch that and similar errors. The story also missed out on a good buildup. We have the first instance of seeing the kid, followed by a long span of nothing, and then a sudden attack. I would focus on a steady buildup of events and interactions, or just have it be a completely random attack. This is a poor combination of the two strategies, and leaves the middle feeling slow, while the attack feels sudden and rushed. The aggressive nature of the fire child is a bit startling, as it does not read as consistent with the town reports. There are stories of car accidents and melted road signs, but no other surprise burnings. Why? What made the narrator special enough to get attacked? That should be included to beef up the story. You also referenced myths told by other children, but do not go into detail. I think that could add more continuity to the story as a whole.

I found the hospital scenes dragged on and did not add anything to the story. The description of the interrogator was way overly details, and took up more words than did the description of the main antagonist in this. I would suggest cutting that part. So, the ending would be instead someone rushes over to save him, narrator wakes up in hospital, narrator reflects on the medications he’s been prescribed to help him cope, but asserts the events happened and the creature still walks.

I think you have a really solid start here, but it needs a little more work to be ready. There are some grammar problems and awkward constructions that should be fixed, and then the ending needs to be reworked. There really is a lot of good here, but there are some places that seem to be trying a bit too hard and end up distracting from an interesting story. Edit it down, and I think there’s a lot of potential. Happy writing!

Alfred Frederick Dinglebottom

I didn’t read all of this one.

You’ve stated that the “weird” child is dangerous in the first paragraph. What’s that based on? Is that based on people talking? What has he done in the past to make you think that he’s dangerous and not just an orphaned child who only walks at night because wimps keep running away from him?

I’m going to guess where this is going. The “weird” kid starts haunting you. Things get gradually more frightening for the protagonist and then the story stops before we find out what happens. Am I right?

weirdo reading manga

Random demon kid that just wants to take a walk. OH NO HE ATTACKS YOU! They think you’re crazy and lock you up. You’re fine now. The end. This was a fail.

Clockwork Candle

In a nutshell: There’s this kid who sees another kid, four weeks later the other kid turns into a demon and torches the other.